1. The poem was written while Ledwidge was in Serbia: Bulgaria had joined the war on Germany’s side, and he landed in Salonika on 15 October 1915. It was during the Balkan campaign, until he collapsed outside Salonika, that Ledwidge experienced one of the most creative periods in his life as a writer. ‘I have no rest of Ellie even yet,’ he said later when speaking of ‘Nocturne’.
1. Owen began the poem at Scarborough in the summer of 1918, revised it in France and sent a fair copy to Siegfried Sassoon in a letter dated 22 September 1918, in which he asked: ‘Is this worth going on with? I don’t want to write anything to which a soldier would say No Compris!’ The poem deals with Owen’s own experience of the Allies’ ‘spring offensive’ in April 1917, and was never revised for publication. Morning Heroes also sets poems by Whitman, Robert Nichols, Li Po and Homer.
2. ‘high places’ – the term used in the Bible and in ancient times for sacrificial altars.
1. Written at Craiglockhart in September 1917 and then sent with ‘Anthem for doomed youth’ to his mother.
2. probably Britannia.
3. The OED’s definition is ‘great public sacrifices’, but Owen might have meant ‘the places where they were slaughtered’.
1. Britten’s War Requiem was premiered on 30 May 1962 in the rebuilt and re-consecrated Coventry Cathedral. The soloists were Heather Harper (Galina Vishnevskaya had been refused a visa to come to England), Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Britten, in a letter inviting the German baritone to take part, referred to ‘these magnificent poems, full of the hate of destruction’.
2. Passing-bells are rung in Catholic churches when one of the parishioners is known to be dying. Cf. Schubert’s lovely setting of Seidl’s ‘Das Zügenglöcklein’, D871.
3. On the advice of Sassoon, Owen later revised these two lines – see the introduction to this chapter.
4. See the introduction to this chapter.
1. The final couplet of Sassoon’s ‘A letter home’ (To Robert Graves), written at Flixécourt in May 1916.
1. malediction, curse.
1. Calvary (Lat. Calvariae) – ‘the place of the skull’ – was the site of the Crucifixion; a Calvary is also a model of the crucified Christ, often found at crossroads in France.
2. The Battle of the Ancre was the final stage of the Battle of the Somme (1916).
3. Cf. the Gospels, where the soldiers kept watch, the disciples hid (for fear of detection) and the scribes passed by in scorn.
4. Golgotha (Heb. Gulgōleth) – ‘the place of the skull’ – was the site of the Crucifixion.
5. The Devil was said to leave his finger marks on the flesh of his followers.
6. Germany.
1. Jon Stallworthy points out (Wilfred Owen: The War Poems, 1994) that the title was probably suggested to Owen by a reading of Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam, a work that he admired for its defence of freedom in times of oppression. Lines 1828–32 read: And one whose spear had pierced me, leaned beside,
With quivering lips and humid eyes; – and all
Seemed like some brothers on a journey wide
Gone forth, whom now strange meeting did befall
In a strange land […]
2. Cf. Owen’s letter of February 1917 to his mother: ‘the men had to dig trenches in ground like granite’.
3. ‘Even from wells we sunk too deep for war,/Even the sweetest wells that ever were’ (Britten uses these variants that Owen rejected for his final version).
4. Fischer-Dieskau, in his autobiography, Nachklang, tells of the difficulty he had in controlling his emotions at this passage. An earlier version of the line ran: ‘I was a German conscript, and your friend.’
5. Owen’s use of half-rhymes or pararhymes is a characteristic of his mature poetry. The final consonants of stressed syllables agree, but the vowel sounds do not match (escaped/scooped; groined/groaned; killed/cold, etc.)
1. One of Owen’s earliest poems. Originally composed (but never performed) in 1960, when Harvey was twenty-one, for a group of Cambridge singers, it was revised in 2010 and first performed at Martin Neary’s seventieth birthday concert at St John’s, Smith Square, on 28 March 2010.
1. golden is the furze.
2. cuckoo.
3. birch copse.
4. skylark.
5. peewits.
6. sparkling waterfall leaps.
1. smack.
2. spilling the broth.
3. bashing.
4. fine.
1. working day.
2. spider.
3. truckle bed.
1. learned.
2. and though it died or it knew you.
1. frolicsome.
2. great hall.
3. mischievous.
4. rude.
1. Inspired by a photograph in The Times Literary Supplement (10 May 1941), reproduced from Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain under Fire, dedicated to Winston Churchill.
1. bread sops.
2. soft.
3. potatoes for a big man.
4. fellow.
5. make.
6. gate.
1. Inspired by Soutar’s horror at the Spanish Civil War.
1. the old oak’s felled. Graham Johnson relates (The Britten Companion) how he was present at a rehearsal of the cycle in 1971. Britten, at the end of the run-through, asked Johnson if he thought that the word ‘doun’ was repeated too many times? And before there was time to reply, he defended the repetitions: ‘It really IS down, you see; it’s the end of everything.’
1. softly, quietly.
2. fresh, cool.
3. parted bone from bone.
4. wakeful.
5. slipped away.
1. The poem, written for Alberto Cavalcanti’s GPO film Coal Face, was set by Britten for female chorus. It was the first time he had collaborated with Auden.
2. The verb is taken from hare-coursing; poachers often use lurchers for catching rabbits and hares.
1. The original title was to have been Scottish Mail-bag. Auden was perhaps inspired by Stevenson’s ‘From a railway carriage’ (‘Faster than fairies, faster than witches,/Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches’) in A Child’s Garden of Verses, but the mood of ‘Night Mail’ is unmistakably Audenesque. The poem was actually composed to fit the images of Harry Watt’s and John Grierson’s film that had already been shot. In ‘Poetry and Film’ (Janus, no. 2, May 1936), Auden explained that he ‘even found it necessary to time his spoken verse with a stop-watch in order to fit it exactly to the shot on which it commented’ (Plays, p. 513). The revised version of ‘Night Mail’ is nineteen lines shorter than the text used for the film. Britten, apart from composing three brief musical sequences for the film, was also responsible for making sound recordings of trains. Night Mail was a romantic documentary, tracing the journey of the overnight Travelling Post Office from London to Scotland.
2. Beattock Summit is a high point of the West Coast Main Line railway as it crosses from Dumfries and Galloway to South Lanarkshire.
3. Kate Cranston was a celebrated restaurateur for whom Charles Rennie Mackintosh created his delightful art nouveau tea rooms at the turn of the century. The Willow Tea Room in Glasgow still serves tea and scones! Crawford’s Tea Rooms in Edinburgh were designed by Robert Burns and furnished by Whytock & Reid around 1925.
1. Written for high voice and orchestra, the score of which was not published till 1964. The piano score also dates from 1936.
2. The song cycle concerns man’s relationship with the animals (the ‘they’ of the poem).
1. The poem, as John Fuller points out, ‘contrasts two views of love. The first stanza shows how in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was felt to be the driving power which, tempered by reason, provided the individual with his basic motivation […] The animals are to be pitied because in them the quality is innocent and undirected: only man can consciously put it to a purpose. The second stanza develops the modern view that love is, on the contrary, not a
noble force at all, but one to be denied because it inevitably leads to the guilt of individualism and self-regard. “His southern gestures modify” means to sublimate love’s genital impulses into not a selfish love, but a universal social love’ (John Fuller: W. H. Auden: A Commentary).
1. The poem was originally set for two sopranos (Sophie Wyss and her sister), but there is also a piano version for solo voice (probably made by the composer), dating from 1941, that was published in 1997.
2. The poem reflects Auden’s dissatisfaction with the physical side of his relationship with Britten: the poet urges his friend to let his hair down, adopt a carpe diem attitude to life and love, and surrender to his instincts. See the letter Auden sent Britten on 31 January 1942, six years after this poem was written (p. 864).
1. The first verse celebrates the beauty of a young man – Auden’s lover, for whom he also wrote ‘The earth turns over’, ‘Dear, though the night is gone’ and ‘Lay your sleeping head my love’.
1. Britten not only changes the title of Auden’s poem but also uses a revised version of his original text. The poem is a withering indictment of sexual repression.
1. ‘Seascape’, a nature poem in praise of the sea without much personal or political import, was written for a documentary film, Beside the Seaside, by Marion Grierson, who used only a few phrases.
1. This tender song from The Dog beneath the Skin (Auden and Isherwood) (1935), addressed to Auden’s lover (‘Calmly till the morning break/Let him lie, then gently wake’), mirrors the rhythm and mood of Titania’s final speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
1. The poem focuses on a failed relationship, this time a heterosexual one. The married couple in question have all they could wish for – a car, children, money, success – except love. The woman ignores the lovelessness of their union. The original title refers to a short story by Somerset Maugham (see Letters From Iceland), in which Sir Herbert Witherspoon has an affair with Alix, a music hall acrobat, after which he views his marriage to a beautiful woman to have been a waste. Auden admitted to Alan Ansen on 17 December 1946 that the ambassador’s girl was in fact a boy.
2. ‘venal’ was corrected to ‘venial’ in later versions.
1. The song had to wait almost fifty years for its premiere, which was given by Neil Mackie and John Blakely in a BBC Radio 3 recital on 23 April 1985. Auden’s sexually suggestive sonnet describes the poet and a friend sunbathing on a roof, aware of the rising sexual tension between them. The sonnet was sent by Auden to Christopher Isherwood in 1934.
1. Auden’s poem, written in March 1936, celebrates human love as a union of human and animal attributes. To what extent it is autobiographical is unclear (Auden did not meet Chester Kallman until 1939), but it seems to reflect Auden’s (and Britten’s) wish to find a lover who combined masculinity and intellectuality, tenderness and feline strength. Britten had recently met Peter Pears, and though their affection had yet to develop into deep love, Britten was clearly inspired by Auden’s poem. The first two verses contrast the unreflecting naturalness of animals with human complexity, much as Rilke had done in the eighth ‘Duino Elegy’.
1. Hedli Anderson was an English singer and actress who trained to be an opera singer before joining the Group Theatre for Auden’s The Dance of Death (1934). She later played the Singer in The Ascent of F6 (1937), when she first met Britten. She married Louis MacNeice in 1942. Wulff Scherchen, reminiscing in 1988, wrote: ‘I often think back to first seeing her on the stage of the old Troc [Trocadero Grillroom, Piccadilly Circus]. We’d walked there from the flat, Ben, Peter and I, to collect her after what must have been a Saturday matinée performance. She was the leader of the chorus line and looked absolutely stunning, indeed ravishing. What marked her out from all the others was above all the effect produced by her voice. As good luck would have it, she later at the flat sang for us not only many of Ben’s cabaret songs, including “Tell me the truth about love”, but Victorian music-hall ballads she knew well.’
2. Britten added the words ‘Liebe l’amour amor amoris’ at the start of the song to be spoken with the piano introduction.
3. This stanza is omitted from the Faber edition of Auden’s Collected Poems (1976), edited by Edward Mendelson.
1. Britten’s title. The poem originally formed part of Auden and Isherwood’s The Ascent of F6, for which Britten wrote incidental music, premiered on 26 February 1937 at the Mercury Theatre, London, where it was sung in Act II, sc. ii, by Hedli Anderson, in a few years to become the wife of Louis MacNeice. When later in 1937 Britten visited Auden at Colwall, where the poet was teaching at a prep school, he wrote a new version which proved a great success with the boys. The poem is recited to memorable effect by John Hannah as Matthew in Four Weddings and a Funeral, the 1994 romantic comedy, directed by Mike Newell with a script by Richard Curtis and music by Richard Rodney Bennett.
1. Britten’s title.
1. Written in May 1939 when Auden was teaching at St Mark’s School, Southborough, Massachusetts – notice the American vocabulary and spelling (waiting-hall, side-walk, sun-parlor car). The poem describes the trips Auden made to meet his lover, Chester Kallman, in New York.
1. The poem is dedicated to Britten, who was born on St Cecilia’s Day (22 November), and the first performance of the Hymn to St Cecilia took place, aptly, on St Cecilia’s Day 1942. For the gradual genesis of Auden’s poem, see Edward Mendelson in On Mahler and Britten, ed. Philip Reed.
1. A reference to the song ‘Green grow the rushes, O’.
2. Literally: making pale.
3. Also a reference to ‘Green grow the rushes, O’.
1. The poem was published as ‘Song’ in the New Yorker on 15 April 1939, and then as ‘Refugee blues’ in New Writing in the autumn of the same year. It was offered by Auden to Britten (‘Dear Bengy – Here is a blues for Hedli, or whatever you think best’); Britten never set the poem, but Lutyens wrote her song for Hedli Anderson in 1942.
2. Auden writes from experience: in 1935 he had married Erika Mann, Thomas Mann’s daughter, so that she could acquire a visa.
1. The poem is the seventh and last of Auden’s Horae Canonicae. The bell, which calls sinful humanity to prayer, is suggested by the Spanish cossante with its recurring lines.
1. The poem dates from 1930 and was written for D.W., according to Auden’s annotation of the poem in the Berg Collection. Each stanza presents love in a different way: verse one is materialistic, verse two tactile and verse three phallic.
1. Written in 1940 as part of Auden’s monologue for radio, The Dark Valley. Benjamin Britten, who wrote the music for The Dark Valley (a CBS production), was the first to set the poem, the unpublished material of which is at Aldeburgh.
1. From Paul Bunyan.
2. dove, pigeon, wood-pigeon.
1. The poem, written in February 1964, using the haiku stanza, was written specifically for setting by Stravinsky to commemorate the anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963.
1. An epitaph for one of the Kallman–Auden cats.
2. Lucina was a goddess, daughter of Jupiter and Juno, who presided over the birth of children.
3. Ischia’s highest mountain.
1. Refers to the classical Alexandrine that Rimbaud abhorred.
2. Paul Verlaine.
3. Refers to Rimbaud’s théorie du voyant, explained in his letter to Georges Izambard in May 1871: to get beyond good and evil it was necessary to develop the creative faculty by becoming the unconscious expression of someone speaking through him: ‘C’est faux de dire: Je pense. On devrait dire: On me pense’ (‘It is wrong to say I think, one should say Someone thinks me’). To achieve this state of magical receptivity, it was necessary to deprave and degrade oneself, as he explained in another letter to Paul Demeny (15 May 1871): ‘Le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens’ (‘The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses’).
1. Like ‘The earth turns over, our side feels the cold’, this poem refers to Auden’s love for the 14½-year-old schoolboy painted by the Downs School art master. Before leaving for Spain on 12 January 1937, Auden said farewell to Britten and wrote out two poems, ‘Lullaby’ and ‘Danse macabre’, on the backs of two scores that Britten had brought with him. Britten was deeply moved, and wrote in his diary, on 8 January: ‘Hurriedly do some more parts (Sinfonietta, this time for further reproduction) before meeting Wystan Auden at Tottenham Ct. Road. He goes off to Spain (to drive an ambulance) to-morrow. It is terribly sad & I feel ghastly about it, tho’ I feel it is perhaps the logical thing for him to do – being such a direct person. Anyhow, it’s phenomenally brave. Spend a glorious morning with him (at Lyons Corner House, coffee-drinking). Talk over everything, & he gives me two grand poems – a lullaby, & a big, simple, folky Farewell – that is overwhelmingly tragic & moving. I’ve Lots to do with them.’ Auden scribbled the ‘Farewell’ (‘Danse macabre’, which begins ‘It’s farewell to the drawing-room’s mannerly cry’) on the flyleaf of the Sinfonietta, and the ‘Lullaby’ on the published vocal score of Our Hunting Fathers. Britten never composed music to the ‘Lullaby’ but used the ‘Farewell’ in 1939 as part of the Ballad of Heroes. Auden’s poem is beautifully illustrated in a late lithograph by Henry Moore.
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 87